Sesame Mucho (Sesame Bars)

In my quest to make healthy energy bars, I had a few breakthroughs in the last couple of weeks. Today, I will give you a quick recipe for sesame bars - really good for trips and for fast energy before, during and after workouts. Because they contain a lot of sesame and sesame is very high in calcium, these energy bars also give you a serious calcium boost. If you eat half of the bars (7) in one day, you have around a quarter of your RDA.

You need:
- 1/4 cup of sesame
- 1 cup of cashews
- 1 1/2 cups of dates

You do:
Grind the sesame into powder in a seed or coffee grinder. Mix all the ingredients in a powerful food processor until you have a firm dough of a somewhat coarse nature. Due to variations in the degree of moistness in the dates, you need to play around with the ingredients a bit. The dough should be so firm that it stays in a shape that you give it. Knead it and form it into a flat brick and then cut off the bars with a big sharp knife. Put them on a tray and in the oven for around 20 min at 200C. After baking, you need to let them cool down for about another 20 min before you eat them or put them in a box. Enjoy.

Basic Orange Smoothie (or "What's wrong with juice?")

One of the HiFi "rules" is to not drink pressed juice. This principle is often met with surprise. "What's wrong with juice?", I am often asked. Well, think about it in the following way:

How healthy a specific food is for you, is relative to what else you eat. If you consume mostly white wheat bread, pasta, meat, coffee, beer, and orange juice, then the juice is clearly the healthiest thing in your diet and stopping to drink juice would be a silly thing for you to do. In particular if juice is the only way you consume fruit. However, if you are a sugar-free, gluten-free vegan, who eats tons of fruit and vegetables and doesn't consume any psychoactive substances then juice might well be the most unhealthy thing in your diet.


The thing with juice and fresh whole fruit is not that juice is bad, but that eating fresh whole fruit is just so much BETTER. Why? Because pressing juice results in an end product that has lost not only most of its fiber, but many other good ingredients.

Let's take a glass of (raw) orange juice (250g). It has a caloric value of 112 and a calcium content of 27g and 0.5g of dietary fiber.

In comparison: 1 cup of orange (sections, 180g, from about 2 oranges) has a caloric value of 85 with 4g of dietary fiber and 72mg of calcium. If you calculate the nutritional value of the fruit with the same caloric value as a glass of juice, you get:  5.3g of fiber and 94mg of calcium, so that's more than 3 times as much calcium and more than 10 times as much fiber for the same caloric value. This holds for almost any other nutrient as well.

However, there is another factor to take into account. Orange juice is so much easier to consume: while people can easily drink a glass of orange juice a day, sadly, not many people are willing to eat 3 oranges a day. But there is an easy solution to that "problem": make an orange smoothie - you don't lose any nutritional value and you still have a refreshing drink. Just throw 3 oranges in the blender and add as much water as you want. Enjoy!

Michael

P.S. Also check out NutritionFacts' latest video on the topic.

Carocolate - Carob Bars

Chocolate cravings? In need for some comfort food or some handy sweets on your road trip or something to give your kids for Christmas?
Try carocolate (carob bars). It's yummy, and according to some of my usual testers, it's the best thing I have ever created. It's vegan (of course) and very healthy 100% HiFi food, meaning it doesn't contain any added sugar, flours, or pressed oils and is high in fiber. It's also high in calcium, which is no surprise, since carob, dates, and nuts are all high in calcium. It's also very easy to take with you on trips, or cycling workouts, that's why you can use it as energy bars.

Since it doesn't need cooking or baking, it's done in about 5 min.

You need:
- 2 cups of dried dates
- 1 1/2 cups of nuts (almonds, hazelnuts or cashews)
- 1/2 cup of carob powder
- 1 vanilla bean
- pinch of cinnamon

You do:
If you want the aroma of roasted nuts in your bars, start by roasting the nuts for a couple of minutes in a oil-free pan or in the oven. Process all the ingredients in a food processor (or with a hand-blender) into a sticky coarse dough. The finer the dough, the finer the final product. Shape the dough into bars, by pressing it down and cutting it with a knife. That's it. Enjoy!

Michael

Vegan Sources of Calcium, a case study (me)

I am always asked a lot where I get my calcium from and I usually say: from dark green leafy vegetables (DGLV), which is where I think I get most of my calcium from. However, I am not really sure how much DGLV actually contribute. I do eat a lot of them, but I don't necessarily eat them every day.

Also, most vegetarian and vegan food recommendation rely a lot on calcium fortified foods, which I don't eat in general. On the other hand, there is a little bit of calcium in most plant-based foods, so it would surprise me if one couldn't get enough calcium from just eating healthy HiFi Foods.

To get a better idea, I ran a little test. I recorded my food intake for on arbitrary day to see whether I actually get the recommended 700mg of calcium a day.

If you want to do the same thing, which I recommend, use this to find out about the calcium content of your food.

So here is what I ate on Wednesday the 30th of October 2013

breakfast (I have breakfast habits that are peculiar to some people):
pea soup - 500g of green peas (120mg),
salt, chili, black pepper, water

lunch:
200g of grapes (20mg)
2 bananas (20mg)
150g cashews (50mg)
250g dates (150mg)

dinner:
100g kale (100mg)
200g broccolli (100mg)
2 tblsp flax (50mg)
2 tblsp sesame (70mg)
4 tblsp nutritional yeast (0mg)
1 cup omega thrice-cream (mango and walnuts, 30mg)

Calcium (sum): 710mg

Conclusion: I have to say that I pulled out some high calcium foods for dinner, because I felt that I might not make the 700mg and even with those foods I barely made it.  Here is what I have learned from this little study:

(1) calcium is something you really need to pay attention to.

(2) If you eat a high fruit diet, fruit (dates, bananas, grapes, oranges) do significantly contribute to your calcium intake.

(3) Nuts are quite high in calcium

(4) My main sources of omega-3 fatty acids (flax, walnuts) are also very high in calcium, so there is a double reason to eat them

(5) Sesame is very high in calcium - a few spoons here and there gives you a significant calcium boost

Simple Chunky Flax Pasta

There are some days that call for pasta and you don't want to eat the highly processed gluten-free pastas you can buy in supermarkets and health food stores. So here is a very quick recipe for healthy gluten-free 100% HiFi whole-grain pasta that takes you all the way from grains and seeds to ready cooked pasta in about 30 min.

I don't buy flour anymore, because only by grinding the grain myself I can be sure that the flour is 100% HiFi. Grinding takes about 2min for the flour used in this recipe, even if you only have a tiny seed/coffee grinder like me.

(Takes about 30min)

You need:
- 1 cup of brown rice
- 1 cup of buckwheat
- 1/2 cup of flax seeds
- water
(- salt, if you need it)

You do:
Grind rice, buckwheat, and flax seeds into flour. Mix the flours well. Add water and beat the dough until it's firm, but not breaking. Roll the dough out as thin as you like (and as much as you can manage) and cut into strips. Cook for 5 to 10min (depending on the size of your pasta). Make some great pasta sauce and enjoy it.

HiFi Bread

This is my first attempt of making HiFi bread. Getting the dough right was a trial-and-error approach (adding a bit of that and more of that), so I can't give you exact quantities yet. However, it turned out quite excellent, both in terms of consistency and taste.

You need:
- brown rice
- oats
- pumpkin seeds
- xanthan gum
- water
- dates

You do:
Soak dates over night. Blend or process dates and soaking water until syrup. Grind brown rice, oats and pumpkin seeds in a seed grinder. Mix it all in a bowl until dough is not sticky, but not crumbly. Bake in the oven until ready (about 45min).

I will work on this until I have the exact quantities.

Hot Carob Cashew Drink

Here is another nice hot drink and a good alternative to hot chocolate.

(Takes about 3 min)

You need:
- a blender
- about 1l of boiling water
- 2 tblsp carob powder
- 10 small dates
- about 15 cashew nuts.

You do:
Put all ingredients in the blender and blend until smooth.

Use less or no cashews if you like it less creamy (fatty). Use less or no dates if you like it less sweet. Carob powder is already somewhat sweet. On the other hand, both whole dates and whole cashew nuts are HiFi - they won't harm you. So why not indulge?

Michael

Eat more - weigh less (1)

That you don't have to starve yourself to lose weight is something I realized only a few years ago, after lots of research and personal experience. In fact, if I want to lose weight, I increase the amount of food I eat. Let me explain this.

In my experience, there are 3 kinds of hunger:

1. Volume
This first type of hunger is the hunger of your digestion system for something to do. This is related to the sheer volume of food you eat.

2. Nutrients
This is probably a more subtle hunger. Your body needs a few hundred nutrients (maybe a few thousand - we don't really know yet). It manifests itself in specific appetites or food cravings.

3. Energy
Every cell in your body, in particular the brain and the muscles burn glucose. Your body needs a lot of it.

The first thing lesson of the HiFi Weight Loss Diet is to understand the difference between these kinds of hungers and not to confuse them. If your body needs some nutrients, it won't ever be satisfied by another load of nutrient-lacking high processed sugary or fatty food with lots of calories.

What you need to eat is high volumes (seriously) of highly nutritions HiFi food. If you eat unprocessed plant foods with all its fiber you get the volume through fiber and water and all the nutrients that are in unprocessed plant foods. If you are on a diet, you never want to have hunger number 1 and number 2 - so dig in!

Avocado Walnut Dressing for Carrots

You think you are not eating enough carrots? Well, some more surely wouldn't hurt. Eating carrots always seems like a good idea to me, but apart from the occasional one that I just snack without any preparation, I don't eat that many to be honest. I don't like cooked carrots, so my only option is carrot salad. As part of my new "eat more carrots"-project, I have created a nice dressing, that is fully HiFi, so you can drown your carrots in it without control.


(Takes about 10 min)

You need:
- a hand blender
- a mandoline
- about 4 medium-size carrots
- 1 avocado
- 1/4 cup of walnuts
- 1/8 cup of sesame seeds and a seed grinder or 2 tblsp of tahini
- 1 orange
- 1 lemon
- 1 piece of garlic
- 1 piece of ginger
- 1 piece of chilli
- no salt (seriously, you don't need any)

You do:
Cut the carrots into small sticks using the mandoline. Grind the sesame seeds into a paste with a seed grinder. Put the sesame paste and the other ingredients into a tall container and blend until smooth. Mix the dressing with the carrots. Enjoy.

Michael

Vegan banana "milk"

This is one of the simplest and fastest recipes I know, but it's very tasty, energizing, refreshing, and particularly great after exercising. It's like a banana milk without the milk, but when you try it you will see that it needs absolutely no milk or anything else to make it creamy - the bananas alone make it creamy.

I recommend this in particular to people who have just started to be vegan and are looking for a milk substitute - it's quickly made and, in my opinion, it beats every processed milk substitute you can buy in terms of taste and nutritional content.

(Takes about 3 min)

You need:
- a blender
- 4 large ripe bananas (with little black spots like in the picture)
- 500ml of water

You do:
Put the water and the bananas in the blender and blend until smooth. Enjoy.

Michael

Reference: I can't claim ownership for this recipe (I guess it's not much of an invention to start with) and it's probably not possible to figure out who made this for the first time. However, I know I saw it for the first time on my friend Olivia's website in a list of things you can do with bananas (the page is in German).

Omega Thrice-Cream

Walnuts are one of the foods richest in omega-three fatty acids. Why not combine them with some frozen fruits and make some HiFi sugar-free vegan ice-cream?

You need:
- 1 cup of walnuts
- 4 frozen bananas
- 3 oranges
- 500g of frozen mango pieces

You do:
Peel the oranges and blend them until smooth. Add the bananas and blend again.  Stir in the frozen mango pieces and let it sit for a few minutes so that the mango can defrost and doesn't ruin your blender. Add the walnuts. If you like some walnut chunks, blend it only for a moment. If you want smooth ice-cream blend longer.

If you eat a quarter of the ice cream you just made, you have your daily requirement of essential omega 3 fatty acids, so dig in - it's good for you!

By the way: the powder used for decoration is carob powder and ginger powder.

Michael

P.S. This ice cream hasn't been engineered to be smooth right out of the freezer, so if you keep it in the freezer, you need to take it out about 10min before you eat it.

Spiced Rooibos Latte

Are you a vegan and you wouldn't consume anything with caffeine, but you like a hot frothy drink once in a while? Try a spiced rooibos latte...

You need:
- a blender
- 500ml of boiling water 
- 3 tea bags of rooibos or the equivalent amount of loose tea
(my preferred version uses two bags of green and one bag of red rooibos)
- half a cup of dates
- a large pinch of cinamon
- a large pinch of ginger powder
- if you like you can also add a small pinch of any of those: cloves, nutmeg, cardamom

You do:
Brew the tea. Let it steep for 5 to 10min (make it strong). Pour the tea in the blender. Add the dates and the spices. Blend. Enjoy :)


Michael

Basic Principle of the HiFi Diet

A Simple Principle:

The basic idea of the HiFi diet is that people feel bad, have bad digestion, gain weight mainly because they eat food that has its fiber removed and not because they eat too much or too many calories. Consequently, the basic principle of the HiFi diet is you don't watch out for calories, but trust your appetite to determine how much of what you want to eat, as long as your food is HiFi. If you eat natural food, you can learn again to trust your intuition. This also means that you can and you should eat a lot of HiFi Food, because if you eat high fiber food you need a larger volume of food.


What's HiFi Food?

HiFi Food is a very simple concept. It's all plant-based (vegan) food that still contains all its fiber. Here are a number of examples: A banana, eaten straight out of the peel is 100% HiFi - all the fiber is still in there. A banana blended with some water into a banana smoothie is still 100% HiFi, since all the fiber is still there, only water has been added. Adding water has no effect on the HiFi status and neither has removing water (through drying, for example). The same smoothie pressed through a strainer, however, is no longer a HiFi food. Consequently, dried fruit are HiFi, fruit juices are not. Fruit smoothies (blended fruit and veggies) are HiFi, unless they contain fruit juices.

Peanuts eaten straight from the shell, are 100% HiFi, even if they are roasted in the shell. They are no longer a HiFi food if they are fried in oil, because oil has been pressed and filtered and is, therefore, no longer 100% HiFi. Adding a non-HiFi food to a HiFi food makes the resulting food non-HiFi.

Sugar is not a HiFi food since it's basically crystalized juice. Hence, everything containing sugar is not HiFi. White wheat flour and things made out of it are certainly not HiFi.

You don't need to eat 100% HiFi all the time, but it's important to understand this principle: Fiber is not an ingredient of food, but something that comes naturally with it. The only way to get not enough fiber is to remove it from the food by processing. Unfortunately, almost all food people buy these days is processed and has most fiber removed. Therefore, I recommend eating a 100% HiFi diet for a week to become aware of
- which foods are HiFi
- how you feel if you eat 100% HiFi foods.
I bet that after one week, you don't want to go back to processed supermarket food ...

There are of course a few other principle you should take into account when choosing what to eat, that are not related to the fiber content of food, but I will discuss them in another post. For today, I just want to state that I don't eat and don't recommend:
- Salt (unless I had a sweaty workout)
- Psychoactive substances: caffeine, alcohol, THC, etc. This includes chocolate and green tea.

"Drinking the Green" - Orange Banana Rocket Smoothie

Most smoothies have a juice as a base ingredient. Juicing is a process that removes most and sometimes even all of the fiber. Hence, these smoothies are not 100% HiFi - they contain the fruit sugar, but not the fiber that regulates and slows down its uptake.

In this recipe, I create a 100% HiFi smoothie by blending the whole (peeled) oranges, instead of pressing or juicing them. Hifi orange smoothies, which are already nice refreshing drinks on their own contain (in contrast to pre-packed or even freshly pressed orange juice) all the insoluble fiber of the orange. Insoluble fiber regulates your blood-sugar level, and cleanses your colon.

As a side note: For leafy greens, it is particularly important to buy organic ones (if you can afford it), because they have a very high surface to weight ratio, so the non-organic ones are likely to be loaded with pesticides.

You need:
- a blender
- 400ml of water (or more if you want your smoothie to be more liquid)
- 3 (medium-size) oranges, peeled.
- 70g organic wild rocket
- 5 ripe bananas

You do:
If you have a high powered blender, you can just throw all ingredients in there and blend them. If you have a cheaper blender, I recommend the following procedure:
Put the oranges into the blender with about 200ml of the water and blend until smooth. Add the organic rocket and blend until smooth. Add the bananas and the rest of the water and blend until smooth. I usually add my daily dose of B12 in the end and blend it in for like a second.

Green smoothies are so much a part of my daily life that I dedicated a series of artworks to them.

Enjoy,
Michael

Mousse au la la! - Vegan Carob "Mousse au Chocolat"

I love carob. Carob powder is just the dried (and sometimes roasted) fruit of the carob tree ground into powder. It's very high in fiber (also very high in calcium and potassium), naturally sweet and, unlike cocoa, it doesn't contain any psychoactive substances like caffeine or theobromine.

This recipe is a sweet and creamy (and yummy) mousse without sugar, and also without milk or cream.

You need:
3 table spoons of fine carob powder
1/4 cup of soaked roasted almonds (roast them very lightly in a pan without oil or in the oven and soak them for a couple of hours in water and discard the water)
2 ripe bananas
1 small tea spoon of cinnamon
1 small piece of fresh ginger or 1 pinch of ginger powder
1 vanilla bean (scrape the inside of the bean with the edge of your knife to pull off all of the tiny black seeds that are found inside and use only them)

You do:
Mix all ingredients really well in a food processor! Chill! Enjoy.

Michael

NEW: If you like sugar-free carob recipes, check out my carob cookie recipe.

GULP (green breakfast pulp)

A good breakfast is essential. This one provides good carbs, proteins, and also gives you your share of dark green leafy vegetables and omega 3 fatty acids for the day. It's fresh, cool, and nice for the summer. The amount is for one person like me. Feel free to eat less ;)

you need:
- 3 bananas
- 3 oranges
- chunk of fresh ginger
- handful of almonds
- 1 tablespoon  of flax seeds
- massive amounts of fresh spinach
- 2 kg of water melon (chilled)

you do:
Grind flax seeds in a coffee grinder and almonds in a food processor. Press the oranges. Then process all the ingredients except the melon with a food processor into a green pulp. Chunk the watermelon and pour the mixture over the fruit. Enjoy.

Michael

Carookies - Carob Bean Cookies

This recipe for sugar-free gluten-free bean and date-based carob cookies was inspired by my friend Annika's outstanding work on other bean-based cookies (which you can find here). They are similar to chocolate cookies, but rather healthy with tons of fibre and a good amount of protein. I use them like energy bars, in particular after workouts when no fresh fruit is available. Carob has been shown to protect against colon cancer.

You need:

2 dl of dried adzuki beans, soak over night or for at least 8h
250g of dates (make sure you get the stones out)
5 big tablespoons of carob powder (available in most organic food shops).
mark of 2 vanilla beans

1 dl of almonds
1/2 teaspoon of ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon of ground ginger (depending on how spicy you like it)
3 oranges (blended)
1 big chunk of orange peel
2 ripe bananas
baking paper

You do:

Cook the adzuki beans for 1h or longer until they start to disintegrate. Cook the beans so that the water is gone when they are done, but make sure you always have enough water in the pot so that the beans don't burn. Put in the dates and the oranges. Cook for about another 5 to 10 minutes until dates also start to disintegrate.

Afterwards, add all other ingredients except the almonds and process until smooth. Add water if necessary, but the dough should be easy to form with your hands and not be too liquid. Add almonds, either ground or chopped, depending on your preference (you can also do a bit of both). Form into cookies on baking paper and bake for about 30 minutes at 200 degrees Celsius. The recipe is for 2 large trays.

Enjoy.

Michael